KATIE MARIE

Oh Dear…

Good afternoon my dearest friend.

Please forgive the interruption to our usual correspondence.

I’m writing to you today to inform you that things have gone a bit wrong. Nothing to be alarmed about I assure you, but it’s gone wrong enough at this point that I need to make you aware.

These last couple of months things have been rather difficult, to put it politely.

To give you some detail so I don’t feel like I’m trying to be mysterious for attention, people who check in at hospitals on Facebook with no explanation, I’m looking at you.

The PhD

There’s been a hitch with the PhD, regarding references. I have been unable to provide an academic reference from my Masters Degree because the department where I studied has closed and the staff have left the university. My undergraduate degree reference was not adequate to convince the university of my ability and thus we’ve hit a snag. We’ve been trying to work around this but it has been proving challenging.

This issue cropped up around the beginning of July and is not resolved. As you can imagine I am slowly losing my mind over it.

After lots of support and help from my tutors and the head of research degrees, we resubmitted my application at the end of July. All I can do now is wait for the University to make a decision on if I will be allowed to study.

In the meantime, to keep myself sane, I’ve been employing that age-old tactic of distraction.

Which is why everything has gone wrong.

One of the distraction projects was to make this website more accessible, particularly for people who use screen readers. I’ve been intending to do this for a while but rushed into it a bit hard in the last few weeks and I seem to have royally messed something up, resulting in a lot of images being deleted, rather than edited.

Yup, I’m a moron.

Not the end of the world, as I said. I do have the images on my hard drive, I can reupload them and reattach them to the letters with Alt text in place. But there are over 500 letters on this website so this will take time.

I’m also off to visit family today, so have no time to fix it until I come back next month.

I plan to have it resolved by the end of September. In the meantime, in some letters, images may be missing.

I hope you will be patient with me while I fix this.